For those of you who may not remember me from two years ago, I'm DFScott's daughter. My last entry in an art contest here was an "Ian Fleming" challenge, and I drew Capt. Kirk and his crew in the style of James Bond.

Dad told me about this month's challenge a few weeks ago, and I immediately set pencil to paper. I started thinking about an entirely new alternate universe, and came up with this idea:

Imagine in this universe, Earth lost the first War with the Romulans and was conquered. Humans had to share the planet with their Romulan occupiers. Earth itself didn't matter much to Romulus except as an agricultural outpost, as long as humans weren't a threat to the Empire.

It's at a checkpoint at one of these outposts, in a place that used to be called "Iowa," that we find one lone voice, one wayward rebel... one James Tiberius Kirk.

(Sorry, I didn't get this first picture of 3 quite finished; when I do, it'll have the rest of the crew.)

Inspired by the early flights of Capt. Jonathan Archer, and by something Archer tried to build called "Starfleet," Kirk raises the spirits of the humans... and one half-human... who serve their Romulan benefactors at the Iowa transport center. He and best friend Leonard McCoy coerce a mechanic who's been indentured there, named Montgomery Scott, to do them a big favor. Together, they fix up an old personnel hauler, rechristening it after the first great astronomer willing to die for his beliefs, Galileo.

The Iowans think Kirk's a bit crazy -- especially Nyota Uhura, who doesn't see how you can build a "rebel federation" around one hot-rod personnel hauler. What she doesn't know yet is that Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty have been collecting the spare parts from the junkyard of old ships that encircles Earth like a corset. In orbit, where no one would dare to look, they took the hulk of a junked-out Romulan Warbird, and retrofitted it with a pair of Henry Archer's warp nacelles. Then they painted over the bird of prey with the logo of Archer's Starfleet, and re-christened the hybrid bird with the name of his most famous vessel.

The audacity to stick it to the Romulans like this peaks the interest of the son of a professor -- a former Vulcan ambassador turned schoolteacher, who married a human female and blended into Earth society. Although he was raised with certain Vulcan traditions, this boy had endured a lifetime of being teased for looking Romulan but acting human. So he learned to swallow his shame, but over time, that shame began a slow boil, forging Spock into the most clever, most cunning, least controllable subjects of the Romulan Empire. That, and he looks cool in leather.

Together, this band of misfits and malcontents use Romulan stealth to steer their "S.S. Enterprise" into all the other corners of space where the power of the Empire begins to wane, uncovering strange, new, and unclaimed territories, seeking out new allies and new civilizations, to boldly reclaim what once belonged to all men who came before.